Top 5 tricks for taking professional looking photos with your digital camera
It’s great when technology in a field advances to a state where the field suddenly opens up to the masses in a way that was never possible before. You could say things like YouTube have done that for the world of video, but long before that development, photography was brought into the mainstream in a whole new way with the popularisation of the digital cameras. Sure the film camera was very popular before then, but there was the developing and the waiting, all of which went out the window with digital. Now you didn’t need to think too much before taking a photo because you weren’t wasting precious film. And that is the crux of the matter. You know what the best thing is about digital photography? Anyone can now take photographs. You know the worst thing about digital photography? Anyone can now take photographs.
It shows. Most photographs taken by the average guy or gal is not quite hight-art, to put it mildly. In fact, if you’re honest with yourself you could even get yourself to admit that most people take photographs which are absolutely BAD. Now wouldn’t it be great if there were some simple tricks you could use to make your photos look better? These are the cherished memories of the people you love (most of the time), after all. They deserve to be good. If that’s the way you feel, try out these basic techniques to take your holiday snapshots and party memorabilia to a whole new level.
1. Use the vertical
The handheld camera has traditionally been a horizontal or landscape instrument. It is the way cameras are designed to be held, one of the reasons being that it is easier to hold them steady that way. But it is not the only way to take a photograph. Regular snapshots are often plagued with a boring consistency of being in the landscape format and sometimes it pays to think differently.
If you think the shot doesn’t look quite right, try turning your camera on its side and you will be surprised at how much of the difference it can make to your pictures. The camera might be designed in a landscape format, but unfortunately the world isn’t always suitably wide to fit into the frame. In fact, if you think about it, you probably spend most of your time behind your camera taking pictures of people, and the last time I checked people are most certainly not built in a landscape format. Make this simple change and you might be able to stand taller the next time you are sharing your holiday photos with friends.
2. Switch off that flash
One of the best developments in modern photography for the lay person has been automatic cameras. With auto-focus, auto-exposure, and auto-flash, you can safely take photos without a thought. Unfortunately to take good photos a bit of thinking can sometimes help, and the cameras can’t do it for you. They can only calculate. A camera doesn’t decide to turn on the flash because it thinks the picture needs more light, it just turns it on because a mathematical calculation shows that it needs more light. That mathematical calculation is not always right, and right or wrong the flash almost always ruins the final result.
Dead white faces, blue tinged scenes and people who look like they were caught in front of the blazing headlights of an oncoming truck. These are all symptoms of the photographs that relied too much on the camera’s judgement on flash usage. Try second guessing your machine, and rely on the miracle of natural light on some occasions. You might need to take a little extra care in holding the camera steady for longer exposure times, but you will marvel at the results.
3. Get close to your subject
An instant way to recognize the clueless photographer is that they stand too far away from their subject. This is fine when you need to take a wide angle shot of the grand canyon with your friends dwarfed before it for effect, but most of the time it’s not. The majority of the photos you take will be about the people, and even if you want to include some of the cool background for posterity, you will find that you need less of the background than you think.
Use the miraculous zoom lens you have on your camera. Better yet, take a few steps towards those wonderful people holding maniacal grins on their faces just for you. Don’t worry, they wont bite. And what you’ll get will be photos that are much more dramatic, much more personal, and much more beautiful than those shots you’ve been getting of whole famous buildings where you need to convince people that that tiny speck at the bottom is indeed you.
4. Use the Rule of Thirds
All good images come down to good composition. Artists and designers can spend years understanding and practising the nuances of what makes a good visual composition. But since you don’t have years to take that shot as your wife/girlfriend/miscellaneous family member balances precariously on some ledge, you need a quick fix and this is one of the easier ones. The rule of thirds isn’t so much of a rule as it is a guide line. The idea is that if you drawing lines over your image to divide it into three equal horizontal rows and three equal vertical columns, you are most likely to get an attractive result if you place your major points of interest at the intersection points of the lines or along the lines.
We don’t need to analyse why this works, but know that it does in the majority of the situations. If you’re used to putting everything smack dab in the middle of the farme and turning up some very boring shots, try this out. It can be a good rule of thumb to decide on a shot, and it rarely makes things worse. Like all rules though, once you truly learn and master it, you will have a lot of fun breaking it in creative ways.
5. Save face with telephoto
By default, most cameras have a wide-angle lens. This basically means your camera can look at a very wide view of the world around. Our own eyes are not as wide-angled and a bit more “zoomed-in”. These zoomed-in views are possible in a camera using a telephoto lens. The problem occurs when you try to take close up shots of people with a wide-angle lens. Their faces end up looking funny because this is not how you can see them with your eyes. Heads become distorted, faces seem to bulge, and arms and shoulders that are closer to the camera begin to look too large in proportion.
The way to solve this problem is to use your zoom lens and step back a little from the person when taking a portrait shot. This way you get a close up of the face without all the wide-angle distortion. Now you won’t have to hear all those complaints about you always ruining people’s faces in your photographs. Another relationship saved by the power of good photography!
Hope you enjoyed these quick tips. What are your secret formulas for taking good shots? Please share them by leaving a comment here. I would love to hear what you do to dazzle your friends with your photographic prowess. Keep on clicking.
for learning …
- Complete Digital Photography by Ben Long
- Designing a Photograph: Visual Techniques for Making Your Photographs Work by Bill Smith
- Understanding Exposure: How to Shoot Great Photographs with a Film or Digital Camera by Bryan Peterson
- Advanced Photography by Michael Langford
- Light: Science and Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting by Fil Hunter, Steven Biver and Paul Fuqua
This post was inspired and instigated by the Top 5 group writing project over at Problogger.net.
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Great post! The example photos really make it stand out from the many other photography posts I’ve seen from the Problogger group writing project.
Thanks for the tips!
Thanks Liz. Glad you liked the post.
The example photographs were an absolute requirement in my mind when I thought of writing this. What’s a post about photography without photographs? Thankfully, I could find a very co-operative model at on short notice.
BTW, great site you have there. Inspiring stuff.
These are great tips! I have a 12x optical zoom that really lets me get good pictures from afar. And I get to catch people when they don’t know I am taking their picture.
A 12x optical zoom! Excellent. I’m assuming it’s a Canon S3 or something similar. Those kind of large zoom lenses can be extremely useful to take candid pictures of people, as you mention. They are also useful for animals, large events, and when you’re on the road and taking pictures from your car along the way.
Glad you liked the tips, and hope you find them helpful during your photographic adventures.
Awesome post and great tips! Thanks! I am going to defintely give the Rule of Thirds a try. Looking at some photos that I find interesting I can see where this tip pays off. I love learning new tricks and now I have. Woot!
Hi Travis,
Glad you like the tips. It’s always fullfilling to see people finding your writing useful.
You’ve quite right in singling out the Rule of Thirds as a good trick because it is. It is the most subtle and seemingly esoteric of the five but that single trick is the most likely to easily give you “good images”. It forces you to think of composition which forces you to actually look at your subject, and the better you look the better your resulting pictures.
I would be very interested in seeing the results of your experiments with these tips. And that goes for anyone else reading this. If you try out some of these tips please do post links to your photo experiments in a comment here. A tip is only as good as its practical applications, and it would be great to see how different people use these to improve their photographs.
Thanks again for the shout out. Hope to see you reading and commenting here often.
One of my favourite tips for taking better photos is “Don’t be afraid to get down and dirty”.
No, I’m not suggesting we all poledance with our monopods. I’m saying don’t be afraid to seek out weird angles, either down low or up high.
Don’t be afraid to get dirty to get the perfect shot. You can do laundry when you get home, but if you miss that perfect shot, it’s gone.
Hope you like it!
I always wonder why my digital camera has those grid lines. Previously, I considered them to be a waste. Thanks for teaching me the rule of thirds.
Happy to help Thilak.
Thank you for bringing up the in-camera grid lines. That is something I forgot to mention in the article, because it’s still not quite a standard feature. But I have seen it in some cameras.
It’s an added help when you are beginning to explore this rule, but once you’re used to it you will have your own mental grid lines overlaying the frame when you need it. Intuition takes over.
I Like the flash on and off example, itz very helpfull for lay person they dont know when to switch it on they really miss nice colors(specially orange cut lights) during sun rise… sun set,…:)
Very nice article.
- Santhosh R Nadiger
a few REALLY simple tips that when kept in mind can make anyone’s pictures look a lot better.
Light balance is very important so when taking photos of friends outdoors try doing it on a slightly overcast day rather than a sunny day, it provides a more diffused light so you don’t have to worry about bright sunlight casting shadows on your subject or making them all squinty-eyed. or take the picture with your frinds standing in a light shade with the sunny background behind them,say under a tree for example. can’t do either? if you have a flashlight in your glove compartment (survival kits can be for more than just survival) it can be used to help cancel out shadows. Also, some cameras like Cannons have a feature in the manual settings that allows you to control the strength of your flash output.
taking a photo without flash can be tricky, it may look better in certain light, but as you mentioned you have to hold the camera still, a couple quick tips to help out when you find the light looking better but now the details are coming out a bit fuzzy:
1. invest in a mini tripod. you can find these for about $10 at a department store like Target or Walmart, and they are small enough to fit into a regular camera bag.
2. no tripod? learn to use the timer! set the camera on a steady surface, frame up the shot and engage the timer you won’t have to worry about shaking the camera.
3. don’t have a timer or just don’t like waiting 10 seconds? use the same flat surface steady your shot by resting your hands on it. not quite as effective since you’re still holding the camera, but it does help steady the hands a little bit.
4. if you are close to your subject try turning your macro on! it helps pick up so much more detail close up. it’s a very powerful, but so often forgotten tool.
also, one quick thing on angles. the angle can sometimes be just as important as where your subject is in the frame. anyone can stand eye-to-eye with their subject when taking the shot, but crouching slightly or moving a good 20 degrees left or right can put an interesting angle on the shot and make the difference between “every vacation photo you’ve ever seen” and “worthy of being framed and put on the mantle”
wow that turned out to be longer than i thought. but neat little tidbits that can really help amateurs get into taking great looking photos.
Excellent tips Matt. Thanks for explaining them so patiently, and adding to the page.
And about writing long comments, they are welcomed and encouraged here. I do it all the time (on this blog and elsewhere), and it’s good to know I’m not the only one who suffers form that particular affliction.
Haha im going to pwn at photo class now
Nice post. I just bought a new camera (fuji finepix 6500) and I will try some your tricks
Regards
Great tips, I’m now taking out the digital compact to take some better shots!
This is a really cool stuff man….Didn’t know that becoming a pro can be this easy.. Cool site
http://www.gadget9.com
thanks for the info, but might I suggest getting rid of that dreadful thing that moves up and down with the page? How annoying! Cheers!
Thanks Dylan. Glad you liked the info.
I’m a bit surprised you found the sliding graphic annoying because thus far I’ve actually received a lot of messages from people seeing the site who specifically mentioned liking that bit in particular.
That just goes to prove you can’t win them all.
For now I will keep it around, because it was part of my vision for the layout of the site and because I’m a bit “religious” about it.
Thanks for the feedback and keep it coming. Hope you enjoy the rest of the site.
For variety and effect, move in really close or zoom in really close and fill the frame with the subject. you don’t have to make it a photo report of how someone looks. a more artistic approach might to be to in so close that the subjects head, and not even all of the head is filling the frame.
when using wide angle, try to keep the camera at the height of the midpoint in a room, about 4 feet from the floor for an average room to minimize distortion, and then keep it level.
use the smallest iso number that light will allow for crisper shots.
get your subject talking and making their normal ‘unique’ expressions and your images will tell more of a story than just the ‘this is my appearance’ type of shot, such as is common with a subject standing in front of something touristy, like the eiffel tower or gg bridge. get some life into it. get your subject laughing or mad, or anything other than a pasted on smile.
expect 1 good shot for about 30 mediocre shots. pros get 1 for about 50, and at that, they take the same shot over and over again and simply use different settings each time until they have ‘exactly’ what the client wanted *excepting for people type shoots. be even then, you can practice bracketing (using various zoom settings snd f stops.
play with it.
Wow!
Mark, thanks for a very solid collection of tips. It really adds to the page and the discussion here.
Good info thanks man
you all smell bad
Claudia, aww you noticed! It’s always nice when your reading public notices the little touches you put effort into on your blog. I am one of the beta testers for the new WP-StinkBomb™ plugin that will be released shortly at the official Wordpress plugin repository. I’m so glad to know it’s working!
Thanks for the comment, and I do hope you come back often. We might all smell bad, but it is all in the interest of science and good PHP coding practices.
I just wanted to comment that you have a great blog, excellent design and I love your writing style.
Although I have rarely used a camera, this post makes me want to buy one and start taking some pictures while keeping these very helpful tips in mind.
Best of luck to you Samir.
Thanks for the glowing review Jason, it’s always a pleasure to know you’re on the right track.
As far as cameras and taking photos is concerned, I know how you feel. There have been many times in my life when I have been totally cut off from the camera, and when I’ve simply not had any interest in photography. But eventually I would see something or read something that sparked my interest again and I always kept coming back.
So, if you have any interest at all in photography, I strongly suggest you scratch that itch. With digital cameras today photography is not a very expensive hobby anymore and the ability to endlessly experiment often imrproves the quality of your work much faster than it was possible before. But above all, I suggest photography because it will help you look at the world in a whole different way, and as far as I’m concerned, the more ways you learn to look at the world the better.
Thanks for the comment, and I do hope you visit here regularly. Maybe I can convince you to try out some other things you were not interested in before.
Samir
P.S. If you do take up the camera and need any further help with that, feel free to contact me. I’m always glad to help.
Samir, Thank you so much for all of your tips. I love photography, but have never really paid much attn. to why I didn’t like the way many of my pictures looked.
The information on zooming in and stepping back from the subject when taking a portrait makes good sense. I have a Canon SD 800 IS and the wide angle definetely distorts up close face shots.
I look forward to trying out the “low light” tip as well. It is very frustrating to get back blurry pics because I turn the flash off but can’t hold it still enough to get a clear shot. I will try the mini tripod I received with my camera.
Wish me luck with taking a few shots of my niece for her senior year. I am very nervous, but have told her I can only do my best:) Thanks again for your tips!
PS Do you recommend a certain on line professional film developer. I would like to find a easy to use, high quality site…any suggestions?
Hi Christine, happy to help. I’m glad you found these tips useful. Once you do this stuff often enough it becomes second nature and I’ve started taking it for granted. So it’s absolutely wonderful to find others responding to it with so much enthusiasm. Makes me feel useful.
You want luck? You got it! Here is one official and industrial-strength good luck wish coming your way over the ether. A bit of nervousness is good to keep you on your toes, but I’m sure you don’t have anything to worry about, your niece is bound to get some quality shots for her senior year. It’s never as tough as it seems.
If you want a further ego boost in addition to the preceeding good luck wish, let me give you another gift (The blog that keeps on giving!). After reading your comment and your problems with blurry pictures without the flash, I thought it was about time I put together another bunch of photography tips. This time something to help people out with that particular problem. So I present to you: Go Steady With Your Camera & Take Shake-free Photos Without a Tripod
I hope you enjoy reading that and pick up some more useful tricks for your further adventures in photography. See, you have nothing to worry about. You’re a photographer, an article muse … who knows what other talents you haven’t discovered yet?
Enjoy!
Samir
Wow, That is the best post I’ve read on any subject for sometime and I learned a lot from reading your five points. I take photos for my blog ( need to take more) this gives me a good grounding on how to take the picture and improve it. The tip about the flash is worth money. I have often been annoyed with the flash going off but just assumed the camera knew better.
Thanks this is a keeper.
Nick
Nick, thank you for the glowing review. I’m always happy to get feedback on this post because this is one of the first posts I wrote on this blog when I restarted it this year, and it is still the most popular destination on this site.
I haven’t written a lot on photography since, but you might also like the article I wrote on how to steady a camera without a tripod.
Hey Samir,
This is a very useful post. Liked the way you illustrated your point with examples. And I do agree about the non-use of flash in photography.
Keep up the good work.
best regards,
Rahul
ps: flora looks good. can be a bit distracting at the start, but one can get used to it.
Rahul, thanks for the kind words and happy to know the post was useful.
As far as Flora is concerned, what can I say … perhaps you can look at her as a a good friend’s slightly irritating significant other. Glad you’re getting used to her, and hope to see you around often.
Reading this helped my alot, I love taking pictures and I just got a Fujifilm FinePix S9000. This camera is becoming a royal pain though because when I take a picture of moving subjects they blur bad and I have tried using every setting on my camera. Sometimes the subject don’t blur and I’ll use the same setting for another picture and that one will blur. I hate using flash all the time, especially in the house because like you said it makes the subject look like there is headlights shining on them, but if I don’t use the flash the picture is to dim. Do you have any recommendation? Thank you!!
Hi Melissa,
Sorry for the long silence. I’m on holiday and haven’t been keeping up with the site as often as I would like.
Now on to your specific problem. The problems of blurring are just part of the challenge of photography, but understanding a bit more of the technical side of your camera and some of its features can usually reduce these issues.
The longer your camera shutter remains open, the more likely you are to get a blurred image, either because your subject moves, or because your hand shakes. In normal lighting, a exposure of up to 1/30th or 1/60th of a second will usually get rid of the effects of hand shake. Anything longer can be problematic, so the aim in low-light and natural-light photography is to reduce the exposure time as much as practically possible while still getting a good image, or to hold the camera steady enough to get a clear shot from a long exposure. Holding the camera steady either involves using a tripod, or using some other tricks to get a steady shot.
One way many cameras deal with low light is to change something called the ISO setting. This is a throwback to film technology where different speeds of film allowed for different exposure needs in the same lighting conditions. While ISO 100 or ISO 200 were the normal film speeds, larger ISO speeds allowed for faster exposures. Digital cameras use a similar effect where larger ISO settings allow quicker exposures but at the cost of noisier images.
The good news for you is that the Fujifilm Finepix S9000 is a very capable camera, allowing some very high ISO settings. I haven’t had a chance to study its features in detail, but a quick online search reveals many features that could solve your problem. One option is to increase the ISO setting manually to something higher like 400 or 800 for indoor shots. Keep in mind that this will produce noisy images, but often noisy images are much better than blurred ones. I believe your camera also has a natural light and an anti-blur program setting. I suggest you try enabling these through the menu and try out their effect. In theory the camera should automatically adjust ISO settings and other exposure settings to reduce your blurring problem.
That’s all I have for now. Once I’m back from my trip I’ll look into the S9000 further and let you know if it has any other tricks up its sleeve that you can use. In the meanwhile, hope these tips were useful. Let me know how your experiments go.
Best of luck,
Samir
Very informative article. I just use a point and shoot kind of camera, but I do have several different settings and the ability to play with the flash and whatnot. You have inspired me to go take some pics! I look forward to exploring more of your blog.
And, I like the sliding graphic,lol.
Thanks Lacey. Always happy to be of service. And always glad to inspire people to take more pictures, especially good ones.
Not that there aren’t enough pictures out there, but let’s face it, most of them are horrible. So it falls on us to correct the wrongs and balance those out with beautiful images. Welcome to the tribe!
Point and shoot cameras are perfectly fine, and even preferable in many circumstances. You don’t have to have a high-end professional camera to take stunning images. Of the 6-7 cameras I’ve owned in my life time, only one of them has been a SLR. In fact, my first proper camera was a plastic, fixed focus, completely battery-free, 35mm film camera that cost about 8 dollars. My brother and myself had matching models in different colours, and we used the sprokets off those, learning almost everything we know about photography in the process.
Compared to that one, even the puniest of the modern digital cameras is a space shuttle, so I’m sure you’ll do fine with your experiments.
I do hope to see you around more often, and while this is always an open invitation to all my readers, you get special treatment for saying nice things about my sliding graphic
— so, if there’s anything you need to know more about during your explorations, or any particular photographic conundrum that needs solving, or if you just want to say hello, feel free to send me a message through my contact page or through the comments here. I’m always happy to help, and see people’s progress.
Thanks for dropping by, and keep in touch,
Samir
Well done, an nice photos;)!
see my work at http://freeartisticphoto.com
your tips are good and funny. i really like them!
thanks!
These are amzeing tips! Thanks!
thanks for the wonderful tips. Here is my summary.
1. Different angles
2. Natural Lights
3. Make your subject a major part of your pic
4. Tic-tac-toe
5. Use zoom for close-ups
i have a few more tips
1. Try different horizontal/vertical positions
2. Make sure the background is interesting
3. Give the pic some depth by carefully choosing background
4. You may use foreground objects to blend with subject
Thanks for the input Cherri. Your summary is spot on … true photography is impossible without fathoming the secrets of Tic-Tac-Toe
Great additional tips too.
I’m need to replace the Pic in my web site. Need to look Professional, Serious, Confident Etc. I’m sold insurances. Can you bring me tips to take this photo?
Will appreciate your help.
Hello Ricardo,
Thank you for your question. Who wouldn’t want to look professional, serious, and confident in a photo? It is a constant challenge to get good personal portraits, especially for people like me who always think they look strange or dorky in pictures.
I had a look at the photograph you have on your site. It’s not too bad, but there are ways you can improve it:
1) The main problem with the current photo is the artificial light. Notice how you can see the lights reflected of your head because they are very high? Try taking some photos in natural light. You could try some outdoors with a nice even background. Make sure there is nothing too noisy behind you. You could also try taking some shots indoors, but near a window during the day. The strong light coming from one side can make your face look much stronger.
2) Try some shots where your body is slightly at an angle to the camera. When we see pictures where the person is standing straight and facing the camera, it reminds us of passport photographs and that can look a bit boring. Just turning a little away and then looking at the camera can make for a much more dynamic shot.
Try these tips one at a time, and also in combination, and then look at the images you get. I’m sure they will be more interesting and you will find what you are looking for.
Hope this helps, and let me know how it goes. I would love to see the results.
Samir
Hi Samir, it´s me visiting, thanks for sharing all your tips and adivices, the class was clear and as I see greatly aprecciated
It’s amazing the capture of the digital camera from an ordinary figure. I always take picture close up more than anything. I don’t really far off from the object. Nice argument here on this matter.
Thank you very much! These are great tips.
Great photographs you have here. I love the ways you describe on angles for the best picture takes.
Regards,
Jermaine
I’d suggest turning flash on is another one, especially outdoors. Forcing the flash to fire outdoors in bright light can save a photo where someone’s face might otherwise have been in the dark, for example. Fill-flash is what it’s usually called.
Thank you !!
:0)
Lol that helped alot
GOOD!
for number 2:
when i have the flash on, it comes out brighter, it looks better that way to everyone i asked, which was better, and i showed them one that with the flash and one without the flash and they all agreed to the one with the flash and they said it looks more life like, while the one with the flash off looks like it is from a fairytale book. I just wanted to let you know you might want to like, change it or something just for better publisity, just a little advice though you don’t have to follow it, other wise all the other tecniques were helpful, thank you!
I have a camara Nikon L20 Coolpix 10mp with 3.6x zoom . but i could not get a sharp picture from this please tell me that how can i get more clear and sharpen picture forom this.
and could u suggest me that which camara is more suitable for personal use at the cost of rs 10000.
Hi Samir,
The Nikon Coolpix L20 is a simple point-and-shoot camera with not too many settings you can change, but from what I’m seeing around the net, it is a pretty decent camera. Have a look at these test shots that show how much detail it captures:
http://www.trustedreviews.com/digital-cameras/review/2009/04/02/Nikon-CoolPix-L19-and-L20/p6
That’s more than enough for most needs.
The only thing I do suggest is that you take pictures at the full 10 megapixel resolution and at the highest quality setting. Beyond that, it’s just a matter of really sitting down with the camera manual and understanding all the features. I’m pretty sure you can get some good pictures with this camera with a little work.
Best of luck,
Samir
thanks samir i m fully satisfy with your help. thanks
Those are some really clear photos you have there.